Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Earlier this afternoon, Flavors of Brazil passed the one million page view mark. We've been watching the page view counter closely the last few days, and knew that it was only a matter of time before we'd cross the seven-figure boundary - but we're still blown away now that it's happened. The Internet is an awfully big place, and in Internet terms one million is a tiny number, yet when we started the blog just over three years ago, reaching such a number wasn't even a goal. Now that we've reached it, it does feel like a goal, and we feel like we've just scored one.

The reader statistics provided by Blogger and FlagCounter give more information that just the number of pages being viewed per day, per week or per month, and some of them we find surprising. Since the language of the blog is English, it doesn't seem surprising that the country that provides Flavors of Brazil with the highest percentage of hits is the USA, with 41.7% of all page views. The fact that the second country is Brazil is a bit of a surprise, though, considering the blog is not written in Portuguese. Brazilians represent 13% of all visitors to the blog. Next in line in the top five are three more English-speaking countries - the U.K. (6.7%), Canada (5.5%) and Australia (3.2%). In all, we've had visitors from 220 countries, including single viewers from the Central African Republic, Gabon, Saint Helena, the Vatican (could it be Il Papa himself?), and the Solomon Islands.

The post which has received the most hits, somewhat oddly we feel, is our post from January 20, 2012 on the jackfruit. It's been seen just under 48,000 times. The most popular recipe on Flavors of Brazil is for fish moqueca, from December, 2011. As of this moment 10, 932 people have looked at this recipe.

Apart from the sheer size of that 1,000,000 number, one of the most gratifying statistics we've received is that returning visitors consistently outnumber new visitors. If a million people visited Flavors of Brazil but none of them returned, the number wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. So we want to take this milestone as an opportunity to thank our visitors, new ones and returning ones. We hope that you'll want to keep coming back to Flavors of Brazil and that each time you do you'll find something interesting, odd or valuable. Or all three.